Page 40 of Knotted in Sherwood Forest

"Would you prefer I leave?"

"No."

The answer came too quickly and we both heard it. Something passed between us. Guy cleared his throat.

"I meant before you've finished."

"Of course you did."

"Robin."

"Bisbane."

He shut up finally. It was, I am fairly sure, the first argument I’d ever won against him outright. I intended to remember it. But somewhere around the tenth stitch, the humor went out of the room and something else came in to replace it.

The cabin was small, built just a couple of people and a small child and a fire. With both of us inside it and the shutters closed, there was nowhere for his scent to go. Cedar and iron and cold clean winter, thickened now with blood and sweat and pain, filling that little room until I was breathing nothing else.

It should’ve been unpleasant. But it wasn’t.

Fuck.

It went into me and sat warm at the base of my spine, and the thing under my skin that had been sleeping since dawn woke and stretched toward it like a cat toward a hearth. I kept my hands steady.

I was proud of that. Keeping my scent steady proved considerably more difficult. The first change was so slight I nearly convinced myself I had imagined it.

Then Guy went and inhaled. He did it so slowly, it made my needle stop.

His breathing changed too, around the eighth stitch, and when I glanced up his pupils were blown wide and black in the firelight and he was staring very deliberately at the rafters and not at me.

He could smell me. Of course he could smell me.

Heat had started a dizzying climb to my throat. I returned to peering back over his wound. His stomach tightened beneath my hand once more. “Stop doing that."

His voice was rougher than it had been a moment ago.

I looked up. "Doing what?"

His eyes came down from the rafters. "Nothing."